This guy is dead on the money. I bet they do it! This is what it takes to do what we want to do! Much more of this! I salute these men and their courage. If asked I would make parts for this endevor I will try and contact them.

Here is the first pictures of the Tycho Brahe spacecraft in the CS workshop. The workshop is situated in the belly of an old ship i Copenhagen harbor. The long tube at the end of the spacecraft is for the drouge parachute. The main parachutes will be situated arround this tube and will be covered by the outer hull.

CS has moved to much bigger locations still i Copenhagen. They are svitching fuel from dinitrogenoxide and Epoxy to oxygen and parafine in their hybridengine. This is because of scaling and weight issues with their previous fuel. They have cast the first test engine with the new fuel and at test can be expected soon.

Time has also been used to experiment with methods to eject the spaceships parachutes. These tests have proved succesful. The first parachute will take the form of a streamer to bring down the initial speed. Later three parechutes will take over for the landing.

Last week came the long awaited Plexi dome, from the Netherlands to be placed on top of Tycho Brahe, so passengers can get a good view.

Although I had the basic objectives of the supplier, it was with excitement that I could make my own measurement. A large pile of files needed to be sent as soon as possible for laser cutting the hatch parts. It appeared that everything matched and the files are now sent out, so I can have the hatch portion produced which the dome must be installed in(with epoxy).

The dome weighs about 10 kg and has a diameter of 580 mm and a minimum thickness of 30 mm and 20 mm at the top. It is also sponsored by Oticon.

By Kristian von Bengtson and Peter Madsen, Monday 10 August 2009 kl. 15:49 The long awaited switch to the high LOX / paraffin-based motor went well!

Last Thursday, 6 August we carried out as planned, our cold-flow test with Baby HEAT. It was to get practice handling of LOX and to see that our valves operate at -183 c. We also have an actuator that is grease lubricated - and although all parts of the rocet in contact with fluids is completely grease free- it should of course still work. This coped with by a small 12 watt heater.

Cold-flow test went well. We used compressed air from a lubefree compressor for LOX persurizing - but was not anhydrous, so we got a stop because something froze. So we switched to oxygen pressuregas and it worked fine as expected. Next time we'll use the N2 – for the same reasons. The gas pressure must be clean of oil and fats, but also from water vapor. Proffs would use helium to £ 839 per. m2, unless they were Germans from the 40s, who used N2 as they did not have acces to He.

Besides the frozen air, we had a small problem with some very hot safetygear. To stand with 70 cm long, thick rubber gloves and face shield on a roaring sun in summer can be stressful, but we kept a cool head and warm feet. One can optimize a bit here by only having the heavy gear on when there is a real chance to be hit the splash of LOX. Tanking LOX took a few minutes and was simple enough.

With LOX unpressured in the tank we closed the valve and tank pressure rose to 16.6 bar in 8 minutes and 20 seconds. So we opened the valve and the pressure was stable at 16.6 bar. We wanted 17 bar nominal.

We had a countdown and opened the flow. Great flow for ten seconds.

Given the success of cold flow tests, it was decided to go ahead and run a hot burn, so we fitted the prepared combustion chamber. 4 kg and 1.8 kg LOX paraffin was on board when the flight director von Bengtson activated the Baby Heat and Copenhagen Suborbitals went cryogen.

The engine ignited well and worked burned for 10 seconds, after which we closed her down. Beautiful combustion, no splashes of liquid paraffin, and the mean burn rate of paraffin is four times what can be achieved with epoxy. Great!

This means that we can make drastic changes in our engines size with just one fuel channel and thus have a very efficient design - there will be no remaining slices and deadweight by MECO.

Post inspection of the fuel burn chamber showed it almost pure, with little residual paraffin around the top of the engine.

The night of Friday, 7 the engine was refilled with paraffin. In the afternoon of 7 drove a reproduction test with the same beautiful results.

In short, paraffin / LOX rocks!

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On the internal lines it gave me the chance to once more to speak to the boys not to expect too much Succes. In his time as motorchairman, Dean Kim Andersen from DARK said that roughly 50% of all amateur built engines explodes, or fail otherwise. He refered to his experimental composite engines - which some claim is much simpler than our semi-liquid engines.

I have never experienced any amateur rocket development program with such a long list of perfect tests. Not since the ‘Great DR nerd’ (danish television program) ordered the XLR 2 manrated rocket boat engine with accelerator. It is the norm - even among the profesionals - in the development of rockets to destroy some amount off equipment in explosive operations and various accidents. It is just the way it is. That it has not happened for us is not because we are particularly more capable than anyone else - I know - it is only because hybrid engines are extremely resistant to errors. Add a certain degree of luck, and some meaningful procedures for testing the valve and ignition pyrotec before every test - and you have a winner.

It also helps we have an organization with a Flight Director who directs and distributes the work so the rocket mechanics can focus on rockets and not be responsible for cables, communications, safety gear, tools and everything else. It is ready when we need it.

You should have been a few times on Stold military testing range and destroyed some test engines and some measuring equipment to fully appreciate this luxury to see one rocket engine after the other roar away at Refshale-island. Still some of the test team were moved to tears when we closed down and had to swallow the experience that it went well again.

In their latest blogpost they had noticed an anomaly in the LOX pressure when fireing their new engine. http://ing.dk/blogs/rumfartpaadenandenmaadeThe LOX pressure drops by a 1/3 when firing the engine and then stabelizes. Therefore they will do a test series using He to pressureset the LOX. The enginetests wil be done this weekend (4-5/9-2009)

Despite the looks of the spacecraft their main conserns in the project are safty and cost. The whole design is based on safty using the safest possible engine, simple reliable designs and having backup systems everywhere.

CS have anounced that the Swedish car manufacturer Koenigsegg will assist in the development off the seat for the spaceship. CS plan to make a seatingframe with builtin dampening to counteract the impact forces. They then plan to make a PVC-foam mold of the pilot to match the frame. Koeningsegg will then make an carbonfibre inner seatings to fit the mold.

I think this once again shows that it is possible to make spacecrafts without being a millionare. If you show that you can handle a project this size and your project is interresting enough, people will help you. In Denmark and Sweden that is

Friday evening we did a test with LOX/paraffine. The LOX was pressurized with helium. Thomas who makes measurements on the engine could sit comfortably inside the office with his laptop and follow the pressure in the tank and the combustion chamber during the test. Outside, we had rain, but so is the weather.

When Thomas whanted to have a look for hiself. he went to another PC on the rocketsite. It has an antenna and with it he can clearly see what occurs in his measurement PC inside of HAB. After a somewhat fumbeling start in March at the HATV test - he is now an expert in data logging. One can also see that on his erect position.

Helium is being sent to the LOX tank through a copper pipe. First it goes through it a little cooler which is a copper tube immersed in LOX. The aim is that it must have the same tempratur as the fluid it will pressure - so we do not lose pressure because of the helium beeing cooled. This worked fine. After refueling. I quietly put the LOX under pressure until the safety valve opened at 17 bar.

The first test went very well - the engine started up with 10 bar chamber pressure, and decreased to zero at a zinc sulfur-style thrust curve. I had designed for 12.5 bar - but it fits with the theory that BABY HEAT is so small that its staytime are too short to harness all the energy in the fuel.

ISP from this test was 130 sec, and average pressure was 4.0 bar. We used 4.3 kg of oxygen and 1.7 kg paraffin. This corresponds to a mixing ratio of 2:53 which is exactly the r / f ratio which gives the highest theoretical ISP combination of LOX / Paraffin. That it was hit accurately proves that our regressionsrate model is accurate. It was developed by the Stanford group, which I constantly refer to. They write that regressionsrate = 0488 x oxygenmassflow ^ 0.62 This is confirmed excatly by our own measurements.

Saturday we carried out two further tests. The first broadly confirmed the progress of Friday's test. The second test took a different course

The ignition had a malfunction - it burned too quickly - and therefore the fuel was not ignited when Fligth Director activated the LOX valve. The lack of ignition was visually detected and the LOX valve was closed again. We performed the test with new detonators and full Helium pressure - but not with LOX topped up. The result was as expected a shorter burn time. It was our first failure after a long range of tests without the slightest incident- and the beauty of it was that we quickly found the error, corrected it and completed the test anyway. When we did not top up with LOX, it was because our LOX supply was so low that we did not expect to have enough anyway. I whant to make two further tests series where we test a little combustion chamber after the main chamber. It's just a room after block of paraffin in which the reaction products from the burning will be allowed to stand and simmer - just a few milliseconds - and where we can get a little turbulence to mix it all. I think it could increase the ISP up to approx. 155 - 160

ISP is messured as the pressure difference over the nozzle. ISP is therefore very dependent on the ambiente pressure. During the static test runs we are broadly in sea level but in flight HEAT have burnout arround 40 km altitude. Here is pressure for all practical purposes zero, so Pc / Pe ratio may well be 1000. It can not be simulated on earth but would give the ISP well over 300 sec. What we see on earth is the relationship between theoretical and obtained the ISP, because it tells us how well we burn our propellant. Right now we are at 74% - and I think I can come up a bit with a little post-combustion chamber. I would think 85 - 90% efficiency is achievable.

Overall I'm happy with everything - and want to work for an early test of the HEAT in full scale.